It's been over a month since I've updated this, but that's because I told myself I wouldn't give an update until I finished FSI French Phonology. I don't want to type updates that are essentially "I read 15 pages and watch one episode of TV" so I decided to not post anything.
FR: I've finally finished that program and will be starting FSI French Basic shortly (was going to today, but my morning got filled with other things). This will be my regular morning thing (I detest the "morning routine" thing that was the craze a few years ago, even though that phrase is apt here). After I finish my current Spanish book (
Huérfano X) I'll be starting something in French, originally it was going to be a book on Napoleon but I've been feeling the French version of
The Da Vinci Code so I'll probably buy that on Kindle and start that.
ES: I've finished
Club de Cuervos and and back on
La Casa de Papel, probably going to ditch it when I finish the first season(/series/part/whatever) because it hasn't been that enthralling. The main motivation to continue would be to get more familiarity with Castilian Spanish. Speaking of, I noticed the book I'm currently reading was printed in Spain, which explains why it was a bit harder to get used to than other books I've read but I now am reasonably comfortable and reading at a decent pace (when the motivation is there at least). I've been chatting in a Spanish Discord server (although it's kind of boring) and have been pleasantly surprised how easy producing Spanish has been, although I'm sure it hasn't been without errors. Especially in comparison to how much thinking I had to put forth (and how repetitive and basic-sounding it was upon rereading) in the new French conversation thread for the post I made there. I suppose I should give the next update in the respective languages here, as that was half the purpose for creating this anyway...
I saw a
vocabulary test in someone else's log (sorry, I forget who) a few days ago and took it in both languages as well as English and am going to post the results here for posterity. I took these a couple days ago but haven't been able to post:
English Vocab Size 12-7-2020.PNG
Starting with English. For all of these I'm paying more attention to the percentile rather than the absolute # because I'm sure we're all aware of the difficulties fraught with this and I don't need to rehash any of that here. This is not surprising, I'm a native speaker with a Master's degree and I have always read a lot (making an effort in the past ~7 years especially to read more books and less Internet). This was primarily for comparison purposes and curiosity's sake.
Spanish Vocab Size 12-7-2020.PNG
Kind of surprised here to be frank. I've read a good bit in the past year and a half, but I really doubt I am in the top 8% in terms of ranking. That said, this provides me a starting point to compare against in the future, so there's that. One thing that did annoy me and may affect these results is that there didn't seem to be an "I don't know" button so I generally picked the first answer--meaning there's a 25% chance each one I didn't know was actually marked correct. There weren't a ton of those for Spanish, however, but there were for French.
French Vocab Size 12-7-2020.PNG
I can't say I'm surprised by the absolute # here (who's to say it's 5,500 instead of 7,500? Although I'm sure it's not 3,500) but I'm surprised by the delta between this and Spanish. I certainly have more trouble reading French and am not ready to read books without the aid of the Kindle dictionary yet, but I wouldn't expected closer to 1/2 the number of words of Spanish rather than closer to 1/4. Ah well, this isn't really disheartening or anything--my plan was to read and listen/watch more anyway. I have a Super Challenge to finish. Plus it means there's still a good bit of low-hanging fruit.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.